


A Study In Orange and Blue

by orphan_account, VerdigrisFizzle



Category: Portal (Video Game), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mind Palace, Morally Abhorrent Shenanigans!, References to Addiction, Thinking with portals, WALL-E Reference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-07 08:42:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdigrisFizzle/pseuds/VerdigrisFizzle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Here's to crack fandom crossovers! Cheers, guys!<br/>Thank you's are in order for my lovely Beta, and to my pug, Maxine, because she actually (and don't ask me how) inspired me to create this little 'fiction.<br/>So here you go, you portal-gun-wielding, deer-stalker-hat-wearing geeks, you!<br/>Muse-ic is Headlock by Imogen Heap<br/>Enjoy!<br/>-DigiRez</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Beginning of Arc One: Headlock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VerdigrisFizzle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdigrisFizzle/gifts).



> Here's to crack fandom crossovers! Cheers, guys!  
> Thank you's are in order for my lovely Beta, and to my pug, Maxine, because she actually (and don't ask me how) inspired me to create this little 'fiction.  
> So here you go, you portal-gun-wielding, deer-stalker-hat-wearing geeks, you!  
> Muse-ic is Headlock by Imogen Heap  
> Enjoy!  
> -DigiRez

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we need more tests.

**Arc One: Head** _**lock** (HAHAHAHA PUN)_

 

* * *

 

A lot of people get miracles, I reckon. Some people win the lottery, some go on game-shows and you watch them late at night on the telly, some become famous singers or actors or business tycoons. And for other people, their miracles are smaller, more mundane. Oh, would you look at that, I didn’t die today. That sort of thing. Mine used to be getting through a night of sleep without the war nightmares elbowing their way into my head. I always considered those mornings, when I woke up to the klaxon of my alarm clock and not the popping of machine guns, little miracles. Just squeezing by nightmares, having enough to scrape by in London. That was before Aperture Science, before the other volunteers and I were assigned identical quarters and ran tests every day, twelve hours a day. I lost sight of miracles. Like waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, after so long you stop looking for it. When my miracle came back I wasn’t looking for it. It just sort of… appeared, by some token of luck or chance. Kind of like, ‘surprise, you arsehole! Forgot about me, eh?’

I think my miracle was Sherlock.

 

* * *

 

The artificial version of night had crept up a long time ago, and lights-out had been put into action hours prior, but there was no denying it; he couldn’t sleep. There was that feeling again, corroding his mind and making him restless, moving back and forth between his bed and the door, wearing out the carpet. It was an itch.

It was called boredom.

“I need more tests,” Sherlock murmured to himself, steepling his hands together and raising them until his fingers brushed his nose. The glint in his eye reflected by the half-light of the lamp in the corner gave him an almost manic look. His stride was brusque and didn’t slow for a second, even when he abruptly threw himself into the armchair in the corner, pulling his knees up to his chest and intertwining his fingers around them.

“I _need_ tests,” he said, voice muffled against the fabric of his pajama bottoms.

“ _Computer!”_ he shouted, unnecessarily loud because the walls were all soundproofed - he had made that deduction on his first day, one of many.

“Please, Mr. Holmes,” replied the computer in its monosyllabic drone, pausing before it spoke his name, because it was programmed not to be kind or remember niceties like that. Sherlock didn’t terribly mind because he often forgot the names of people that weren’t important in his line of work; clearing out the attic, as he put it.

“Lights-out was initiated four-point-two hours ago. All occupants of Testers’ Quarters were required to sleep at that time. Do you require assistance?”

“I need to do more tests. Let me go to the testing chambers.”

Sherlock had made it to, roughly estimating, chamber two-hundred and five, and he had been there barely a week. He was the most intelligent out of the batch of testers, and completed tests almost faster than the overseeing AI could compute. They once had him hooked up to a polygraph to make sure he wasn’t cheating.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Holmes,” there was that detached pause before his name, “but testing hours are over. Please sleep.”

Sherlock growled, pulling his fingers through his curly black mess of hair, and practically flung himself down on his rather uncomfortable mattress. The blankets were a little itchy but they had been warmed by the attending custodian ‘bots that roamed through the Testers’ Quarters. He glared up at his ceiling, palms pressed flat together and resting on his lips, eyebrows furrowed with an irritated concentration.

“Computer, would you administer six milligrams of eszopiclone and a glass of water to my nightstand?”

The request was delivered within minutes, in the form of a stemless wineglass halfway filled with copper-tasting tap water and the two royal blue tablets. He downed them without hesitation, wriggling under his blankets in restlessness. There was a clock face nailed to one of the walls, and in the dim pool of light cast by his lamp he could vaguely see midnight strike before the sensation of bricks being placed on his eyelids overcame him.

 

* * *

 

He woke up to the screaming of metal as his room was wretched away from its support beams **.**


	2. Stadium Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we slam into walls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hullo, hullo!   
> Well this certainly took long enough! Sorry for the mini-hiatus, midterm exams have been coming up and I am SWAMPED. But here we are again!   
> Muse-ic is Stadium Love by Metric.

When people are scared, the first thing you tend to hear is the screaming. The throat-ripping sobs of terror. You see the tendons in their throats pop out and dance, and their eyes turn into huge round things about the size of dinner plates. In all the old movies the girls would scream like that, scream until your ears began to itch. _“War of the Worlds”_ was the worst; _everybody_ was screaming.

But when Sherlock was scared - those precious few times that reminded you that, just maybe, there was the pulse of a human beneath his apathetic, cold exterior - he was quieter than a cemetery. Quiet, with his eyebrows so low over his eyes that they threw shadows over them, and his mouth pinched in a decided sort of line. When he was scared, he retreated inside his head.

  
  


He’d wanted to be a pirate, initially. Take to the seas with no living soul about for miles, just his mind and his body. That was to be his life, but pirating hardly pays the bills.

The rocking of his suddenly airborne room was, if he concentrated hard enough, a lot like the tossing of the waves under a ship. But that was where the nostalgia ended.

He could hear the metal pipes buckling and cracking in his bones, every odd movement bringing forward a new chorus of horrific-sounding shrieks.

His lips became a paper-thin line, and he realized for the first time how ridiculous he probably looked, tossed to the floor of his collapsing room, sprawled out on his back like a dead crab, lips firmly set as if this new series of events were particularly interesting but hardly exciting.

As he scrambled to push himself into some semblance of an upright position, his ears caught something over the din of his crumbling furnishings.

“Oh, please. Don’t bother moving yet, wouldn’t want you to lose that pretty face of yours.”

Voice as cool as peppermint, diction sharper than a butcher’s knife, tone that could bring a man to tears, she spoke again from somewhere overhead.

“Not to be rude, but how about I show you to the door? Introductions would be terribly easier if we had solid ground beneath us.”

Sherlock remained mute, observing the progressing events with barely a flicker in his controlled, chilly demeanor. Inside his head, the gears began to churn once again. He was utterly delighted to be a part of these turns of events.

Her voice was cool and her words were playful, almost like a cat playing with a ball of yarn, claws unsheathed, but he couldn’t make out where she was or approximately how old she was from it. The mental block manifested into a frown, and a few creases began to form in between his eyebrows.

The faux-oak floorboards beneath his armchair creaked dangerously, and with a sound like the Kraken rising from the depths, that section of the floor fell away. Wind gushed into the room, cold and clear, filling up his mouth and nose and sliding through his curls. The armchair plummeted into a royal blue background of oblivion.

“You may want to hold onto something.” She said, voice lowered in concentration. Sherlock glanced around what was left of his room, and found a handhold in the decrepit remains of the wall beside his bed. Clinging to it gratefully, he turned his face away briefly to defend himself from the spray of splinters that rushed toward him when another portion of the wall near the hole that once was the armchair ripped away, revealing a set of suddenly-bare pipes and more royal blue beyond.

The royal blue, Sherlock decided, had got to be a place. Or some outline of a place. But it had to be something, because they were hurtling toward it with a speed that could be called excessive.

“I can’t get past the wall. Are you holding onto something?”

Sherlock searched for his voice, found it, and said with considerable relish, “ _Yes!”_

“Oh, you can talk,” she cooed (because the warm velvet of her voice turned every word into a coo).

The sharp wind that breathed across his face turned almost sinister as their speed increased exponentially. He clutched at the wall with frozen fingers, lips set into a terrified line.

In the moment of impact, everything turned to white noise. Like fixing an amp to inter-stellar static, everything erupted into unadulterated noise.

 

* * *

 

At first he was aware of pain - lances of pain crisscrossing his shoulder - then of a kind of pastel light that was nearly foreign to him. And finally, a blurb of a voice.

“Bloody hell! I didn’t think you’d smash through the damned wall!”

The pastel light floated above him, through the dense blackness of his eyelashes, a kind of soft lemony yellow that looked so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, Sherlock was unsure of if he was imagining it or not.

His mind was unnecessarily cruel, he thought, if it was.

“Fine. You know what, go and seduce a toaster, why don’t you?” said the blurb of a voice. His words were more distinct, Sherlock noted absently. Consciousness was coming back.

A palm on his shoulder, and then searing pain arched through him more vicious than lightning. He vaguely heard himself cry out, but felt his throat seize with the shout.

“Oh! Sorry, sorry. Just lie still, alright? Your shoulder’s out of its socket.”

The pale, warm light was interrupted by some kind of figure. Sherlock blinked and grunted what he hoped would be accepted as an affirmative.

He cried out again as it was wrenched back into its proper place, biting down on his lip to keep it from fledging into a full-on wail until he could taste the metallic sourness of blood on his tongue. He scrunched his eyes shut, and when again he opened them (it must have been minutes that passed in between), his vision no longer swam or careened.

“You alright there?”   
“We’re losing time. If we’re going to go, we should probably go now.”

“Shut it, will you?”

Sherlock blinked, staring to his right at a man he had never seen before, wearing an outfit identical to his. ‘Watson’ was stitched in thick, black, embroidered italics on his breast, just as ‘Holmes’ was on his own.

Sherlock glanced him over, as Watson returned his gaze uncertainly.

“You alright?” He repeated, shifting in his kneel next to Sherlock as if his leg was giving him trouble.

The very first thing Sherlock thought to reply with was,   
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”


	3. Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, hello, hello!  
> Muse-ic is Now by Paramore.   
> This is the final chapter of the Arc! New Arc next chapter!

There are five things in this world that, someday, I think everyone faces. No matter how brave you fashion yourself out to be, or where you come from, there are certain principles of life that need to be scaled and conquered.   
Fear.   
Hatred.

Betrayal.

Hope.

And the very, very last thing, I came to learn on my own, like your blind side finally giving you sight. Like that feeling of binding chains across your ribs when you’re staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out where exactly you fit in, in a mosaic that doesn’t need you.

It’s the incredulous smile that grows on you when you introduce yourself to the person who will become your saving grace, even if that person himself is broken beyond fixing.

* * *

  


“It’s been a long time,” he heard John murmur behind him, staring at the same ivy-laced, rusted wall he was. Sherlock extracted his gloves from his jacket pocket, slipping them on with the casual demeanor of a man rounding the block for a cup of tea on a Wednesday afternoon. There seemed to be absolutely nothing wrong with this situation - not a thing.

“Obviously,” Sherlock remarked, flexing his fingers. He ruffled his hair, feeling pouring back into his body.

“Nice to see your brain is fully-functioning,” said the core to his left, lounging on her maintenance rail and gazing at them with a bright heliotrope-colored eye.

“Quite. I’d think the introductions you’d promised would be in order now?”

The core blinked back at him inquisitively, seeming to analyze him in a way that he was not entirely sure he approved of.

“You’ve met John. He’s a fellow tester.”

“I’ve gathered as much, but I’m more interested in who you are.”

John had the grace to cover his offended expression from behind Sherlock.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the clever one? Why don’t you deduce for yourself?”

Sherlock tipped his head ever so gently to the side, and in a mocking manner one corner of his lips curled up.

“I already have. You’re attached to the maintenance rail, but I haven’t seen you before, so you must not be assigned to the Testers’ division. More likely you’re an informant, judging from your utterly useless design and fragile plating. The fact that you are sentient and have a personality is indicative of your station as a scientist’s consultant. Which accounts for your rescuing of both me and Doctor Watson.”

“John,” the man behind Sherlock corrected. Sherlock turned on his heel to stare at him (admittedly flustered by the abrupt interjection). The fair-haired tester hesitated under the glass-like gaze, but he persisted anyway.

“It’s John. And, ah, how did you know I was a doctor?”

Sherlock rounded on him, taking brisk steps to bring him hovering very close. His palm was icy on John’s hand as he brought it up to eye-level, roughly shoving the sleeve back from his wrist. The way he analyzed his skin sent a shiver through John’s bones.

“Scarring on your fingers indicates the use of a scalpel, and the bands of lighter-colored skin on your wrist hint toward surgical gloves.” Sherlock dropped his wrist, gesturing to John’s lips with blade-like motions. “You are also less tanned around your mouth, since you’ve been wearing a surgical mask out in the field. And I know,” said Sherlock, not looking at anywhere else but John’s eyes point-blank for the very first time, “the look of an army man. You have something different in the way you hold yourself. Were you any good?”

John spluttered, fascinated by the observations the towering, tenor-voiced man plucked out of thin air. His voice found itself for him while his mind recovered.   
“The best.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows lifted, mouth in a decided sort of curve (something like, dare he say, approval?).

“Very good, then. You -” Sherlock, in his usual rushed manner, spun back to face the bored-looking core up on the ceiling.

“Do you have a name?”

“The scientists called me 1R3N3. I fashioned that into Irene; easier to pronounce.”

“Pleasure to meet you. I assume you’re familiar with the layout of the building?”

“Okay, wait, hold on,” John intervened again, stepping straight up to Sherlock, “I’d like to know where we are, when we are, and what we’re planning to do before we go on off and do it. Is that alright with you, Mister Clever?”

Sherlock blinked, frowning down at the noticeably shorter tester with an expression of interest and irritation.

“Must you interrupt?”

John crossed his arms with adamant resolve. Sherlock huffed.

“Fine. Alright. I am Sherlock Holmes, currently on test two-hundred-and-five. I am a consulting tester. Is that enough for you, or would you like me to bemoan my secondary school career as well?”

“That’ll do, thanks,” John dismissed him coolly, and then turned to Irene without dropping the chilly exterior.

“And?”

“Oh, alright,” Irene rolled her singular eye. “We’re in the maintenance shaft. The abyss down there, past the railings?” She gestured by swinging her whole body toward the royal blue background Sherlock remembered seeing before. John blinked, impressed.

“It’s endless. If you fall over, you’re guaranteed dead. This shaft leads to the supply warehouses, and from there to the power conduits. The year is 4098, if my chronometer isn’t faulty.”

“ _4098?”_ both men replied, about an octave above their usual cadence.

Irene blinked, apparently not listening to them.

“Oh, that’s an issue.”

“What is?” John replied, clearing his throat in embarrassment.

“There are turrets approaching. Hm. Lots of them,” Irene paused a moment, before looking back down at them with one scalding amethyst eye, laced with contempt.

“Shouldn’t you be running?”


End file.
